This is a guest post written by Sophia, a developer at Wordprax.
With the incessant growth in Smartphone usage, the popularity of mobile apps is also on a rise. And so, leveraging the power of apps can help you expand your brand reach.
When it comes to creating a mobile app, remember that design is a crucial contributor and a key driver to delivering a successful app. And a good app design requires you to pay focus on designing a application interface that is clean, simple to use and easier to understand for users.
Though user interface design trends change over time, while some of them are short-lived, there are a few UI design patterns that still work when it comes to building a successful and pleasing mobile app interface. In this post, we’ll explore some of the persistent design patterns that you should consider while designing an application interface.
Easy to Operate Login Screens
Let’s face it! Even though, we often hear a lot of words and saying about offering easy to use app interface to the users, yet so many apps come with convoluted or small-sized login screens. This might frustrate your users, as they’ll find working with the app difficult, and reading the input fields from the tiny login screen will certainly give them a headache. So, it’s very important to design a simple login screen with readable input fields. For example, you can take inspiration from “Facebook app” login screen.
Adding Swipe Gestures
A lot of apps such as Twitter come embedded with excellent swipe features, allowing users to swipe left or right while reading a tweet. Moreover, Android and iOS apps also come integrated with built-in swipe functionality, and can also handle a single tap, double-tap and related functionality. You can refer to such applications to get an idea: how you can embed the same design functionality while designing your own app.
However, make sure to plan how you’ll be adding swipe features into your app beforehand – during the wire-framing process – prior to getting started with the app design or development process. A swipe or tap that users make while accessing a mobile device has a profound and lasting impact on the users’ mind.
Optimize Pull to Refresh
You can most likely find this design pattern in several “content feed” apps. Earlier, while viewing some feeds users generally pulled down the screen to view the rest of the feed or refresh it. This design element was initially available on Twitter and Facebook iOS older version apps, however, this pattern is now commonly used while designing other type of mobile apps as well. Though, the functionality “Pull-to-Refresh” is not new, but it might need to be altered.
Plan a Comprehensive App Tour
Integrating an “app tour guide” into your application is probably one of the best design patterns you can think of, helping users to know how they can explore all the screens and features of the application. Especially, this could be a great feature for a novice – who hardly have any knowledge – about how to operate an application.
Take the example of The Nike GPS tour that helps users view highlighted features of the app with the help of vivid graphics, easy to use navigation and a clearly visible exit. Users can find the Tour on the home screen of the application. Make sure to plan a tour that highlights the main features of your app that users might be interested in, and try to keep the tour short and visually alluring.
Embed Sidebars
Irrespective of what sort of content you include in the design of your mobile application, make sure that the content flow is as fluid as possible. However, in comparison with desktop systems, mobile devices have relatively small screens. And so, the biggest challenge of mobile design is to adjust all the content on a small user interface without any clutter. For this purpose, you can use sidebars to perform seamless transitions between different parts of the application. This design pattern is the secondary section of apps like messenger, maps, and a lot more.
Let’s Wrap Up!
It’s pointless to build an app without having familiarity with the design patterns that helps to optimize the usability of your app’s user interface. The best way to observe the best UI design patterns is to look out for successful apps that users like to re-visit time and again. Remember, to pay attention to every little detail: How the apps are handling subscriptions? Is there some tour or guide provided along with the app to help users understand about using it? and so on.
Note: Just keep in mind, not all the new applications UI would require all of these features, as each app is designed to serve some specific purpose. And so, carefully evaluate each of the aforementioned design patterns and choose the ones that best fit your needs.